There has typically been known a music piece analysis technique of automatically analyzing information of a music piece from its music piece data. The music piece analysis technique is exemplified by a technique of detecting beats from music piece data (see Patent Literature 1), in which BPM (Beats Per Minute) and tempos can be calculated. Moreover, a technique of automatically analyzing keys, codes and the like has been developed.
On a typical DJ performance, a DJ (Disk Jockey) manually sets a cue point (i.e., connection point) and a mixing point. With use of such music piece information, an operation such as connecting a music piece to a next one without providing a feeling of discomfort can be suitably performed.
Such a music piece analysis technique is applied to a music piece reproduction device such as a DJ system and is also provided as software to be run on a computer for reproducing or processing a music piece.
As another example of the music piece analysis technique of automatically analyzing music piece data, there has been known an audio segmentation technique of pinpointing a beginning time and an ending time of a segment of a music piece to allow grouping of the segments or extracting of the segment(s), using an advanced similarity judging function (see Patent Literature 2).